1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for authenticating a user according to biometric information such as a fingerprint, voice, and so on.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the infrastructure of communications lines have been desirably organized. Information processing devices such as computers, and so on, are interconnected through communications lines, and users can remotely utilize various services. In money or privacy involved services, it is indispensable to confirm the identity of a use through a password, and so on.
On the other hand, unfortunately, there has been an advantageous environment developed for criminals who try to prepare a program to automatically find a password using their own computers. Therefore, a user is requested to use a long password. But, it is necessarily difficult to manage or memorize a long password. Under the situation, a matching check carried out using biometric information such as a fingerprint, the iris of an eye, a voiceprint, the distribution of the blood vessels in a retina, a signature, a face, the pattern of a vein, and so on, is expected as a method for replacing a password system because biometric information can be more easily maintained or memorized, and can realize correct user authentication.
However, the conventional user authentication technology using biometric information has the following problems.
The reproducibility of biometric information mostly depends on each person, and some users may indicate very low reproducibility of biometric information. It is difficult for those users to use the system as is. On the other hand, the system itself is not appropriately developed to use the user authentication technology on an inappropriate user (who cannot use the technology) using biometric information.
Furthermore, according to the user authentication technology using biometric information, there is the problem that the acceptability of a user and the acceptability of others are traded off, and the acceptability of others should be enhanced to maintain constant acceptability of a user. Therefore, when specific biometric information is adopted, it is necessary to provide a systematic countermeasure for a user who finds difficulty in using the biometric information.
Particularly, in the user authentication in a network, a common network protocol and sequences cannot be properly maintained unless an exception process can be appropriately performed on a difficult user.
Furthermore, since only one type of authentication data is transmitted in a conventional password system, there arises the problem that a difficult switching operation is required for the biometric information.